I wake up slightly before my alarm because my body is tingling with tired energy. Everything feels porous because inside I have enough energy to be flooding but outside I don’t have enough to reel it in through my pores. It pours out over the side of my bed and for just a minute I’d fiddle with my phone and turn off the alarm. Assuming I am not fully up would be silly given the experience I have of myself. My Dad is in the bathroom. I can hear him but not how long he will take. How long will he take? I don’t need much time but he could still take too much of it. How long will he take? Probably not long, right? How long does he usually take?

Everything’s ready and lined up but surely I am forgetting something. I won’t think about whatever it is because it isn’t super significant. I have what I need. I don’t need breakfast and there is not much of it that’s quick. My Dad offers to make bacon and toast. What’s the time? 6:15 it reads. 6:15 and we should leave at 6:30. How quickly can it be made? I must have asked that. It’s okay. It’s fine. It’s okay and it’s fine to give up a bit of that time for breakfast. Especially because my parents make it. It is the last meal from my father I’ll have in a while. There’s only Canadian bacon in China and I’d like a last taste of real bacon. It would not be worth it if it made me miss the plane, but it couldn’t. It surely couldn’t because my plane is 9:30 and that’s so many minutes away. I have counted them so many times. Three sets of sixties from when I set out. 2 and one half set when I get to the airport and it should take just 1 set of sixty to wind up at the gate. That leaves one and a half set just to in case of disasters. I have never had more than one disaster at an aiport but it cost two hundred dollars. Two hundred dollars is a quarter of my paycheck. This time a disaster would be the whole of my paycheck. I can afford a disaster but it would be half of what I’ve saved over months of work. But there won’t be a disaster and if there was I’d be ready.

It’s 7 and I am saying goodbye. It is just 7:30 and I am at the gate. There was a longer line than I expected but at the Indianapolis airport this is still next to nothing. You know I was only home for two weeks? Why was I driving to leave so early? If I stayed an extra hour to talk with my parents I’d have been fine. We’d not have much to say but the company’s appreciated on each end. Should I have rushed off? I am bowing again to fearful impulses. At the same time, my Dad couldn’t have seen me off if I left later. Was it a bad decision? It would have been definitively a good one if there was a disaster.

Get this: my layover at O’Hare is only 50 minutes. 50 minutes and O’Hare is very big. If they land me at the wrong terminal I should still be able to get to my right gate in time. Knowing O’Hare there could be a technical difficulty and that could just screw me but truly there’s nothing I could do about that. I’d might as well put it out of my mind because it’s out of my hands. It is absolutely out of my hands. If I had to recheck my bag that’d very likely doom me but I asked the woman at the check in station and she said I didn’t. It is possible she’s wrong because one point in the process has been wrong about the next one before. When I went to Beijing I nearly missed a flight because of rechecking bags. Another time I was actually fortunate because one person said I’d have to recheck bags and the other prevented me having to do this. I am not sure how my luck would be here and maybe I would only know if I saw my bags at that final claim.

Remember when I said the layover was 50 minutes? Kidding, it is 7 hours and 50 minutes. Mechanical delay notifications buzz over the speakers and you should hear the Chinese chatter all around me. Wudian wudian wudian delayed delayed delayed. Rosetta stone just taught me what that meant. I tell my parents and my Mom already knows that I won’t want to visit Chicago relatives for fear of having to return to O’Hare from the outside. I’ve been burned by O’Hare’s abysmal systems before and really I’d have hardly any time with my relatives. But if I’d hopped on the opportunity as soon as the delay came in I could have had maybe 3 hours. Is that so little time to not be worth it? What worries me more than all these missed connections is that now I get into Shanghai at 10 PM. It takes around 2 hours to get in from the airport to the central railway station and get tickets, and by this time the train station will certainly be closed. I’ll have to spend a night won’t I? Will they pay for me? Do I select my own hotel in that case or just a voucher for something near? In the case that I do get my own hotel or just have to find one I really need to have a name an address on hand. Since I often don’t get wifi in China I’ll need to do this now and screencap the results on my phone so I could give them to a cab driver. Actually, if I can’t find an outlet – which at O’Hare is entirely likely – than I really ought to turn on my Chinese phone and take a photo of my American phone’s screencaps because my American phone powers down faster once I am in China and it may not last long enough. If that eventuality happens than I’ll need to ask about a hotel and they’ll point me somewhere expensive and if I pay 500 RMB for a night that is 1/10th of my monthly salary because of a poor phone battery! Heaven and a half, I am really tired.

I could nap here at O’Hare. Thing is, I should nap right before the plane because this would allay my jetlag the best. Though, if the delay shortens and no one wakes me up at the gate I could miss the plane. It might be better to just sleep at the very beginning of the flight, though this would not be as good for my jetlag. I could sort that out when I land but I’d like to have energy for getting to the train station. The thoughts don’t actually matter because I get caught up watching Lynch’s Elephant Man, which is really very beautiful. The movie is long though. It is thirty minutes from over but maybe I should stop it and return to the gate. It is an hour til’ departure but they may have bumped it up. The cafeteria I am in never plays announcements. I wonder why this is, but it is because it is O’Hare. O’Hare is a model of a mini modern hell. I have seven hours and fifty minutes to waste with you, O’Hare. Do your worst. Actually, don’t. Don’t bump up my flight and not tell me and make me miss it, please. Please don’t do that because I am so curious what happens to the elephant man. I really want to know about the movie but I also want to know what happens with my plane. Has anything happened? It is only fifteen minutes until the show ends. Okay, I can wait for the show to end. They wouldn’t bump it up on me. This fear is not so big. Okay, 14 minutes. Alright I’ll pack up everything around me so I can zip out at the end of the movie. First I’ve got the power cord pulled out of the defunct outlet and in my bag. 13 minutes. Then I have my phone and my mouse and my keyboard all back in my bag. 12 minutes. It is me the movie and the laptop. 11. 10. 9. 8. The plane should still be there. 7. 6. 5. It should really still be there. 4. 3. I really hope it’s still there. 2. 1. Why wouldn’t it be there, though? Okay, done! I’ll check. I’ll check on my plane right now. I go through a crowd of teenagers on some trip together with their school. It’s all been managed. Their smiles have no weights on either end. There are still lots of Chinese people here so my flight should be around, but what if it just left them too? It didn’t, it is there.

I buy some books and food before the flight. Is it funny I got Kafka’s short stories for the flight? I adore him as much as every English teacher I had told me I would. Damn you, you insightful souls! Am I really that predictable?…

On the plane there’s really nothing at all I can do so you know I am almost relaxed. I don’t quite sleep properly but the plane’s got loads of caffeine and I am fine. What would I do if I turned into a big roach? I think I’d handle it better than this guy in the Kafka story. He never tried to write a message in his sticky cockroach juice. Damn skippy, I’d write my family a fine I ❤ U in my sticky cockroach juice. I’d like to think my Dad would know to exhibit me sideshow style too so I could at least cover my cockroach costs. Can’t blame poor Gregor for too much though, he’s got a calmer handle than I’d have. Although, his mind is too much on things past his control.

Hey, just so you know, these don’t run in sequence. You can read whichever little piece you want without having to know the other. Anyways, isn’t it oddly intimate and strangely contained sitting next to strangers for over ten hours?

On the Airplane I sat next to an old Chinese man from Wuxi and a woman from the Sichuan province. The old man was with his old miss who sat next to the lady from the Sichuan province. When they got to talking the Sichuan woman asked where they were from, because she couldn’t understand them. It was strange because I could catch most of what they said, but Wuxi is very close to Changzhou. Somehow I started talking with them and they were all very pleasant and as we small talked in that official Mandarin common tongue. The old man wore a Purdue shirt and I told him I was from Indiana and he told me he had a kid in university there. I wanted to show him the tickets I had from when I went on a day trip to Wuxi but for some reason I didn’t. The Sichuan lady talked to me on and off about things I can’t remember. It felt swell to be able to swap simple sentences though.

Once she even asked me what the dessert dish was – it was a chocolate mousse. I translated the word mousse to tell her but apparently it does not have a food meaning in Chinese so she first asked if it was edible and then corrected me to say jelly. Though I then felt this was incorrect, because as far as I am concerned if it is chocolate it can’t be jelly or jell-o. It had to be a pudding or a mousse or something else. Languages have so many gaps between them you are bound to fall in at some point so I did not press the issue any further after she corrected me.

In front of me there was a little mischievous boy with a perfectly circular face and big sideways poking ears making trouble masquerading as some small simian – maybe a little lemur – and pestering for attention. He had shot up from his chair a few times to give me ubiquitous stares which I met with waves and all sorts of faces. It didn’t faze him. When I let my long legs loose and pushed up poke toes out underneath his chair he smacked the edges of my feet. It didn’t faze me.

Little lemur child and I naturally developed a storied airplane history. He was stretching up at the reading light above him and his parents were too tired to stretch arms up for him. On his behalf I hailed a stewardess and pointed her toward him. She’d had enough of his monkey machinations and row running explorations already and curtly pointed to the little remotes in the seats that managed the lights. Guess I should have known that well enough. The little lemur child would not acknowledge the help of either of us anyways and as the polite Americans we were it of course made us both a little sore.

Children are tough entities to strike reason into or extract reason from. They do and you deal with it because they were compelled by some wrenching invisible force to do whatever they just did. I am not sure this one ever actually slept and I am not sure his parents were ever awake more than an hour. The boredom for him must have been a bit rigid so he popped up at me a few times and made perfectly neutral expressions pretty much no matter what I did so gradually I became mostly neutral to him.

I got up to the bathroom a lot that flight because I could not get much sleep either – an unpleasant surprise – and they kept refilling my jasmine tea – a pleasant surprise. Finally the old man whose slumber I kept disturbing arranged a seat swap with me and his wife. Once I settled into the aisle I saw the boy’s round head and satellite ears crop up. His eyes shot to me and for a second the neutrality had faded for a bit of disappointment. Some of my neutrality faded though I don’t know in favor of what. At the end of the flight I’d accidentally scuffle him with the edge of my backpack. He protested for a second and I apologized for a second and no one seemed to notice either way so we both stopped and set our eyes forward. When we landed it was like everyone felt too weary to do anything but get out quickly with eyes downward.

In the Chicago airport I got very lucky. The pit stop in Chicago was unplanned to the point were we all had to recheck our bags. I was supposed to go straight to LaGuardia where I’d spend ten hours – basically the night – on layover before I got home. I had gone to the gate and mostly accepted my fate when I let my parents know I was in Chicago. We had lots of family and plenty of options to get home from here so I thought I’d see if they wanted to manage something else. My Dad urged me to take it up with American Airlines, since the unexpected stop put me so much closer to home.

I am not sure what American Airlines looks like or how I’d describe it. In my head it is probably some fusion of cramped seats and crowded check in lines with those pleasantly dim fluorescent lights hanging over the counters. It is kind of a distant thing – not really a stark image at all. But when I am there at the counter American Airlines is the man standing behind it, speaking with a slight Eastern European accent. That accent is an O’Hare familiarity I enjoy after coming back from China. The man is only half into my conflict, which is only fair because I am just two thirds there myself. He has a kind of neat and slightly too tight image like everything else in the airport. In conversation it comes undone some and he calls me “buddy.”

When he directs me back to the counter of my own flight I am despairing slightly because the line in front of it is full of patiently waiting people trying to nudge into any empty spaces the flight has. Like me they stand tight by their bags, fidgeting slightly. At that moment maybe AA looked like anyone in uniform so I clambered over my own baggage toward an unoccupied attendant standing at a kind of podium with an odd, antiquated looking computer in it. She clicked and clacked at it with some inquiring looks, like she wasn’t urgent about it or was even figuring it out herself. She was a middle aged woman a few inches smaller than me despite curly hair that rose up two or three inches. I explained my situation quickly and without expecting much because I was so last minute that my flight to LaGuardia would board in twenty minutes.

She calculated for a second in a quiet kind of concentration, but it did not actually take her long to decide to reroute me. “It makes no sense to go to New York when you are this close.” I agreed but felt pleasantly surprised to hear her completely take my side. It did not seem her hands were tied up in anything and she quickly began to bounce between a computer in the desk and the one at the podium. The time ticked down and with each minute I was worried my luck would run short and I’d go to LaGuardia. I’d half expected it even though she had told me straight that her work at the computers was to switch my ticket around and print me a new boarding pass. I’d expected some little administrative thing to trip it all up.

To be fair, it ran right down to the wire. The attendant next to the one helping me started to announce the boarding just before my passes to another flight printed. I thanked the attendant heftily and she deflected them mostly, saying it made sense and it was no problem. In truth it looked like a bit of a task for her, tabbing between two computers for a solid fifteen minutes right up to the start of the boarding process. It was hard to tell because of how steady she was and the quiet tone that she spoke in. She had just a small flicker in a voice as slight and resolute as the airport lighting. For a second I stood at the gate as though I still had something left to do there or like I’d left something behind.

Only two hours away from home I was smiling like the bright Midwestern sun while I sat by a wall charger to give my phone enough life to make contact with my parents. All the folks around passed with rhythmic steps and some looked down to better understand my squatting. I smiled at a few and the last hour felt filled with slight motions of politeness as efficient and measured as the low light flood of white airport light that felt pure to the point of sterility. But you know there are often moments – completely random and very small – that always break like a ray of real sun through the slick veneer of things. When that happens I never know how to react and sometimes I slide right back into the slickness of the veneer.

I have made the grave mistake of promising some folks back home a travel blog as I go to Changzhou, China to teach English. If you travel abroad, this is something you should avoid doing. You might think I am just being misanthropic, but if you don’t heed my warning you’ll have the task of adequately recording the sentimental memories clinging to you all the way from one international flight to another. But I am here, and I want to bring a bit of it back home for some relatives, so this starts my second Chinese travel blog.

Plenty of trips start with a nearly crying mother, I think. That’s where mine really begins. It is the fine point where my mind cordons off old home from roaming. While I am weighing my baggage my mind is far off. Most people look up when they think about things, and my eyes are trained on the massive swooping ceiling of O’Hare. It looms grey and full endless empty space like an international airport ought to do.

My mother’s making anxious conversation with the clerk at the desk passing me easily through the process. I am hearing the words, registering them. But it is hard to respond right.

“He’s my last one.”

She says of me, the fourth to live outside of state and the second to live out of country.

“He’s the baby.”

And that one I’ve heard so often that I can hardly be embarrassed anymore.

“Oh, this is really the hardest one.”

That one slips out, and it’s really different from what I know.

“Oh, I’ll miss you guys a lot. That’ll be the worst part about being so far away.” I say. The O’Hare ceiling curves into endless up and open. The words are token in some way, but you do your best – especially with goodbyes.

Together we haul my two massive bags off to the side to get scanned and tagged. Then I step into the security line and hug my Mother. I had gone fast enough that my Dad did not need to come in, but I hugged him earlier. When my oldest sister Britt left to live in Cyprus with her husband I remember her looking back at us. She was waving, with beautiful thin drips of cinematic tears coming from the corners of each eye. As the line moved and Mom did too, I wondered if I should cry like my sister had. I really couldn’t even if I wanted to. But seeing her standing there in Indianapolis International security is so vividly beautiful in my memory. When she stepped over that threshold I swear it was so singular and dramatic that even near a decade later my head can set the scene in detail. In recollected strokes I’d painted it out so well I can still see the whole airport materialize around her.

Sometimes stomaching forward movement is a forced process, and glancing back seems like it’ll suck you into hell with Orpheus. I respected the way she looked back, brimming up. It seemed courageous to roll up all that past and future into the present and let it wash outward in overload. I am not sure if my heart could even manage it. But I believe you are in part the strength of your family. The O’Hare airport swelters up with the hot talk of time consumed passengers. Everyone’s steamed words boils up to the top of the building and I am with it watching it shift and lurch along in line. I am looking up. Maybe I was thinking about how I wasn’t alone. Most likely it wasn’t so pretty, just something pithy about the trip in front of me.

But I’ll spare you the nitty gritty of TSA checkpoints and layovers and try to highlight what good and interesting I found in it. Chicago goes to LA and LA to Taipei. In between I am feeding myself caffeine and rough sleep to keep upward. My body’s a twisted ball of anxiety, I can tell you that for sure. No matter how bad my memory is, if it is a long trip then I am sweating it. Believe me, I have done it before in several separate forms. Far flung as Spain and close as D.C. and San Francisco I go hours early to airports for meeting eventualities that have rarely struck me.

At the LA airport I am six hours early for my flight and ask an attendant for the gate number. There’s a school group heading back to Hong Kong swimming all around me. On the flight I am packed tight to not touch a Chinese teenager on one side and a woman on the other. For some reason, I am constantly stealing glances. Is this the time to practice Mandarin? I stayed silent since the thoughts in my head sounded too loud.
At Taipei the airport is Orientalized tackily. It has a calligraphy station for anyone interested in dabbling in that during their layover and random Asian topography splattered over linoleum floors. There are people from the States, clearly from my program but I have million other things twisted up in my stomach so I can’t fill up on conversation. Intriguingly, I see early my later roommate standing a few chairs away from me.

Then there’s Shanghai Pudong, my final destination. The halls here stretch on endlessly. If looking up at O’Hare was something then looking up here was something more. The glass arteries pour us out across at least ten of those flat escalators that carry you and your luggage across terminals. The big red camping backpack saddling me bites on the shoulders some. Normally I am shaking at the baggage claims for fear of losing something dear. This time my heart is really racing. But it can’t even beat for long before the big black bags come pounding out on the conveyor belt. Funny how things work out, someone I’d come to talk to quite a bit at orientation was across the way, speaking on his own anxious waiting.

My baggage is quite a bit. I have to stay for eight months, so there’s a lot to bring along. I have to place a smaller suitcase haphazard on another and roll both away. Hearing so much huffing and puffing, a friendly Chinese man offers to help, but I decline. It’s fine for now. I am on solid ground and I couldn’t care less how much I was carrying.

AYC coordinators meet up with us and in no time I am carrying on conversation. All of our faces are marked with the mixed feelings of eagerness and anxiety. Coming together, I think we all feel a little less alone. I know I do.

On the bus the Shanghai suburbs spin outward and I really feel back. It is a weird sensation, but in some way I feel a simultaneous sense of familiar and far, home and hotel. I had been in this place once before and for some reason it felt incredibly fitting to be back. The sun starts to settle behind rows of buildings constructed to look the exact same. Some stand half-constructed underneath the dying sun, while others sparkle with bits of light while all of them tower over small, squat housing areas with green lawns that sometimes turn to dirt fields. It is not vibrant foliage, not tiered rice paddies, not ancient terraced roofs of palaces. It is only a grey freeway that sprawls out into a suburban nowhere that has rapidly reached out to everywhere. It is a place where people live, will come to live, and will move away from.

It is China. Lots of journeys start with crying mothers, but most don’t end that way. Most journeys don’t stay in what was given away from an old home, but live in the process of making a new one. Maybe I can manage this. Maybe I can teach like I mean it, make meaningful connections like I speak the language, and live here like I’d like to. I’d be happy to just get close to those expectations. That tight ball of anxiety and nerves in my stomach bit by bit untangles and I feel an easy smile creeping up on me.

Travel makes me anxious. Ever since I understood what returning and leaving meant, I feared the action of both. Destinations only feel real in flickers. When the sun shines the right way, reality drops like the other shoe. My brain claps and realizes something’s new. The realization goes as quick as it comes. Mostly, a day is a day and living’s living. Routine’s the thing you should watch for.

When you have a routine anything feels familiar. The routine can revolve around change. Those instances of travel feel more foreign than the destination. They are unfamiliar. When I assume anything of an airport I am reminded not to. They have the same soaring ceilings. They have the same tired out TSA or custom workers. They have the same endlessly revolving conveyor belts full of luggage. But every time I go to airports these little changes shake people up like fissures and earthquakes. I’ve heard all sorts of bitching and berating about how this never happened last time. I loathe airports and airlines. I am charged one thousand dollars, and can only bring a carry on and personal bag. If I bring a carry on that’s too large, it gets put in luggage, and I may get charged. I cannot pack anything important into my checked bag, though. That’s a rookie mistake. Your laptop gets lost in transit. One thousand dollars a ticket is not enough to screen out the thieves. Of course, if I bloat my carry on, it ends up in the same place. So I saddle it all in my backpack, my personal bag. Fittingly, the things that matter feel the heaviest. I haul them across the uniformly tiled terminals. But you cannot fight airports. They suck. The airlines do too. However, the more you lose your cool, the worse it gets. You have to move and adapt, because the white washed walls and pillars create a fine facade.

In a way it was a good mentality to start with. Just work with what happens. I tried to keep myself from fighting against the flow of travel. It was not so hard. My dad and I made it to Chicago, and then to the airport with ample time and ease. My anxiety caused all sorts of sharp little movements. When you don’t go watching it, your body and mind match each other. My hands shook while my mind rattled through this nonsense about airports and destinations.

I had no problem getting on the international flight from Chicago to Shanghai. As luck would have it, I sat by a Chinese mother and daughter. We shared friendly banter and tried to working past our language barriers. Unfortunately I hardly knew any Chinese. It poked at a raw nerve. I realized how the little Chinese I learned did not matter much. The Chinese they spoke sounded so separate from Rosetta Stone’s calm cadence. It did keep me studying and focused. I poured over my notecards, and they even corrected a few. They helped with pronunciation too, but that slipped too easily from my mind.

I got into Shanghai about on time and got through customs pretty quick. The line was long, but I did not mind much. I spent the time talking with another student who had been to Beijing. The vaunted stamp in the passport made any stress worthwhile. Those stamps always felt like stories. Though I supposed the real tales came from the conversations with strangers walking the same path.

The Shanghai airport did not seem foreign or exceptional in any real way. It seemed like any other airport. I breezed through it like any other airport. Heading up to the air china booths, I tried to get my ticket. The machines would not process me so they took me to a teller. I gave them my information. Here’s where the routine got shattered. I needed to re-check my bag. In literally every other airline I have heard of or used, you just got your bag at the final destination. Instantly my hands shook and I started to sweat. I set my feet back towards the baggage claim. I had time, but anxiety reasons less than it demands. I felt I needed to move fast, so I did.

Going back to the baggage claim actually meant going through security. I agreed because I had to. My confusion was secondary at best. The short delay stressed me out more than it ought to have. The black conveyor belt spit out bag after bag. I watched it patiently for my black bag. Instantly I wished I brought a big hot pink suitcase. Black on black on black. Even a grey suitcase would have stuck out. I knew the look of my bag. I still felt each black bag for my name tag. Nothing called for me. I waited until the airport attendant told me no more bags would come.

At this point I wanted to panic. I did not know the language. Most of them did not know mine. I was a long way from home facing that fact the process of filing for a lost bag might make me miss my plane. I did not know basic grammar, let alone how to reschedule a flight. I kept control of my anxiety here. Oddly enough it did not involve swallowing it like a pill. I just rode off the nervousness and smiled. I did not fight the possibility that this would suck. It very well would. I had to move forward. The conveyor belts don’t run backward. At least I could get an English attendant and probably find another flight.

I got the form to file for missed luggage, when someone with Air China pulled me to a side area where my bag sat on a cart. In my rush, I overlooked an area bloated with lonely bags. I grabbed it quick, and started to run for the ticket counter. I hardly had time to process the depth of my error. Ironic, considering haste caused it all in the first place. I did not have a lot of time. I had enough to thank my good luck. I’d take luck over language and intellect any day.

The woman read my ticket once it printed. She started furious conversation with the woman next to hear. She told me my flight was boarding. Furthermore, my bag had some sort of liquid in it. I needed to check it at the gate. We ran down to an expedited version of security. They ran me through as quick as they could. I set to running to my gate, carrying my 45 pound bag. I would have been the pinnacle of fitness if I made myself run that hard every day. The bag rolled roughly behind me, but I kept it at balance. My feet would start to slow, forcing me to hammer my legs back into gear. At that moment I really felt I had to make it. A few passengers casually stood in line, waiting for someone to take their tickets. My heart soared. My legs took a rest. A smile stretched across my face. Finally, the breaths came easy.

The worker handling the tickets made an audible and sympathetic sigh when she saw the sweat stream from my brow. She took the ticket stub, and let me through. I strode through the long aisle connecting me to Beijing. It felt like a victory I nearly was not expecting. The man next to me must have been worried. A sweaty, panting white kid with a big dumb smile sat down next to him. I could not have smelled good either. More than anything I felt silly. I put so much drama in getting there and nearly forgot where I was headed in the first place. I dreamt about this. For years I yearned to learn about the soil I soared over. I spent hours of independent study trying to grasp the grain of a country now in my palm. A few small pops of laughter leaked out. I forgot this was all part of my journey to the East.

Nowadays things are strange. The journey starts at the destination. We plowed trails with worn feet once. Our horses hooved their way through deserts and decay. In our old travels we stumbled on blocks of ancient civilizations. Villages took us in for days when we could not beat the weather, for gain or goodwill. Now mostly we zip and glide regardless. We still get snagged on slip ups. There are less bumps but we stumble just the same because we’ve learned to mind our feet less. Life’s about the journey. They have said and I’ve agreed. But where’s the line between journey and destination drawn. Who demarcates that, and what’s their agenda? When I got on that plane to Beijing I told myself the travel stopped. No. The sand erased the line. I am not sure it was there to begin with. The disappearance of that line made the desert all the harsher and all the more beautiful.